An invigorating, original debut

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Emporium

By Adam Johnson

Viking, 246 pages, $24.95

The contemporary short story has a reputation, deserved or not, as a bit of a stiff. Lacking the expansive canvas of the novel, it can seem doomed to respectable inconsequence; mere practice for writers working up to producing something meatier; or just so much pleasant filler for the back of magazines like The New Yorker--something many of us might read during an unforeseen airport delay but otherwise systematically skip. Common wisdom says short stories can be small marvels of craftsmanship but are unlikely to be ambitious, riveting, or groundbreaking. Thanks to this orthodoxy, it came as a surprise to all and a near scandal to some when a book of short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Like a squall moving in on a dead-muggy day, Adam Johnson's audacious work blows the covers off such assumptions about the short story and leaves the genre newly invigorated. The nine stories in his debut collection, "Emporium"--some of them filling fewer than 20 pages--triumph on scales small and large. All of the virtues of the short story at its conventional best belong to them: the deft, economical sketching of character, the planting of resonant little epiphanies among the minutiae of everyday life. But these stories go even further, whipping up a whole askew fictional universe that exerts an unrelenting centripetal force on the reader.

Some of the fiercest pieces in "Emporium" take place in a not-very-distant future, marked as such by Johnson's extrapolation of disquieting existing trends in American social and cultural life. In the lead story, the electrifying "Teen Sniper," hostage situations have become a daily occurrence in Silicon Valley. The resulting demand for police snipers has made sharpshooting a youth activity as mainstream as basketball, with its own Disney Classic and Team Adidas. Not that anyone is overlooking the psychic fallout for young marksmen like the narrator, known as Blackbird:

"Lt. Kim's one of those sniper commanders who also has an MSW, so she's always all over my emotions. I've been having some dreams, I'll admit, and we've been working on replacing bad images with good ones. Flowers are supposed to be my replacement images. . . .

" `Blackbird has the shot,' I announce and begin my positive visualization, which Lt. Kim says gives my mind a newer, more optimistic vocabulary for violence. A slug to the chest resembles a dwarf rose blossom, for example, so I would try to think of that. The head produces a pink mist of baby's breath."

In the world of "Teen Sniper," therapeutic damage control like Lt. Kim's is hard pressed to keep up with the mental toll of daily standoffs. When Blackbird finds a rogue sensation, empathy, creeping into his workdays, his sniper career heads toward crisis even as the discovery of human connection as a possibility awakens him personally.

A second story in this vein, "Trauma Plate," opens with a line like a dark joke: "The Body Armor Emporium opened down the street a few months back, and I tell you, it's killing mom-and-pop bullet-proof vest rental shops like ours." Johnson is a nimble and inspired purveyor of such half-surreal, half-credible futuristic conceits; he makes it seem just a few logical steps from today's Wal-Mart to tomorrow's Body Armor Emporium.

The balance of Johnson's stories--except the bizarre but hilarious Cold War sendup, "The Canadanaut"--hew more closely to realism and present-day settings. Still, none could really be said to deal with ordinary life. "The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite" features "a nineteen-year-old go-nowhere who drives a charter bus for a cancer victim support group on Thursday nights." In "The Jughead of Berlin," a family awaits a raid by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms of their illegal home casino.

"Your Own Backyard," in which a father's desperate efforts to stem his young son's alienation seem only to accelerate it, is the most brooding turn here, and the most powerful story I've read in years. Here as elsewhere in the collection, the institutions and technologies of modern life brutalize a susceptible spirit, in this case a haunted ex-police officer turned euthanizer of surplus zoo animals:

"They put you on Traffic first, so you got used to such things. On Traffic, you'll see pelvic wings unfold against steering columns. There'll be breast plates you can see light through, dentures imbedded in dashboards. Stuff you need the kitty litter for. . . ."

"If everyone did a year on Traffic, we'd all speak another language."

The language he has in mind is that of people who have witnessed ravaging like this and come away from it softer, not harder, who go on feeling in an increasingly anesthetized America. Such are the enviable unfortunates who populate "Emporium." Their collective experience as damaged but receptive souls gives this book its searing originality and its urgency.